#dys4ia

[sqviid]

[museum-of-screens]

Dys4ia (2012) 

Creator(s): Anna Anthropy

Type: Flash

Language: [EN] 

Status: Port Available

(Content Warning: Flashing colors, transphobia)

[yukiunknown]

wip 5/23/23

trying to do more gritty atmospheric dnb / breakcore stuff

i love making music

[stellastarprincess]

Hoooooly fucking shit. This woman might've actually been the catalyst for me realizing I was trans! She made the game Dys4ia, which I remember playing on Newgrounds waaaaay back when it came out in 2012. I'd completely forgotten about this game, but it had captivated me for the next couple years after I'd played it!! It was the first time I had ever heard of HRT, and I remember it fascinating me to no end. It was *also* the first time I had ever experienced a trans person talking about their own experiences, as opposed to hearing about it from jeering fuckface channers.

I remember really loving the game. I adored the art style, the cute/melancholic/whimsical/hopeful tone of it all. It was so informative, I learned so much about the effects of HRT, and I remember feeling really weird about it. I think I'd had the thought "I find this... oddly appealing", and that freaked me out. It lived rent-free in my mind for a long while.

Barely two years later, I realized I was trans. And I think Dys4ia was one of the major driv8ng forces behind that decision. So thank you Anna. From the bottom of my heart thank you for sharing your journey.

ppl on Twitter have for no reason I can tell rediscovered Mighty Jill Off, thee cute indie platformer abt lesbian BDSM from 2008. I have no idea why it's gaining traction again but I just thot u all on here wld like 2 b part ov that 2

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary118

1/9-10/2024

tuesday - wednesday

listening to some no-wave right now.

athletic automaton - the small ball game.

it's a good song, really fucked up nonsense riff spiraling out.

anyway today w/ music, i did not do what i wanted, i thought i'd get to 2 bigger remixes and 1 smaller correction, but i only did the small thing. i think this is partially because the next two big things are daunting, as in idk if i'll be able to get them right really, at least on this like, whatever-eth pass. but eventually. it's all iterative, and it's okay if it's slow, as long as i am learning.

i did do something good today though, re: productivity in art, i wrote a bit, or not a bit, a good chunk, something to fit into somewhere that maybe seemed thin, fleshing out multiple things, i think. and then a bit of narration right for the end came to me, in the shower. i really am happy with these two additions, they feel very strong.

otherwise today i did something i don't do a lot, i played 2 video games.

i'll talk about the like, artsy, game first.

i played 'he fucked the girl out of me' today, and i found it mostly good, i think, i guess i have to reflect on that more. i think maybe i just wish some parts where you are spending a long time walking, you moved faster. i don't know why though. i know those parts are supposed to make you feel stuck and miserable. it's also just that feeling of being stuck and miserable while walking, there's usually more than just that, there's an uncomfortable resonance w/ the environment, there's some kind of detail there making it all more lurid. or something. i dunno. that's a critique that's almost like 'missing the point' but it did come to me. i love the screen the game ends on, with the planet and the big mountains on it, i found that very pretty. i think maybe i also wish the game were written slightly differently but i don't know how, i really don't, i guess it just felt like it was maybe too caught up on itself, a lot of digressions w/ the audience. maybe i am just too eager to think 'fuck them' in those kinds of situations. but the more i talk about it, the more i think i basically like it because of how nostalgic it makes me, not even for stuff i necessarily like, but that whole first boom of queer games being made, that i remember, like that one game dys4ia (bad, basically, but fond memories of it), i remember playing that stuff as a kid, and through the years, into hs, seeing interesting queer indie games, often with that pixel art style, sometimes not, a big one i recall like that was that game anatomy by kitty horrorshow, who i wonder about. does she still make stuff?

it looks like maybe, she seems to kind of appear/disappear but she has an update on her patreon from 2023, so it seems like, maybe positive. i hope she's good rn. i really liked her games. cryptworlds was another huge one, for me, that game is kind of a freakish digital fort thunder feeling thing almost. there were others, as well, i remember porpentine's stuff, anyway, this game really connected to that period for me, the messiness of it, i do like that about these things, that's something that in hs inspired me to write, the relative rawness/emotionality of it all. i still think being able to go there is important but i also think now there's something to grow past in that, i guess it's the sense that if you're just emotionally raw all the time, you don't get anywhere, confessing 100% of the time doesn't get to the tension of being a person i think, there's things we don't ever even disclose to ourselves, maybe we think we do, there's a degree of distance at times, and then there's times we exceed (i don't want to use the word transcend as it suggests you become superior to/jump over that original confessional rawness) that and jump into something else, visions, ecstasy, explosions/disruption, in short i guess there's a way in which these confessional works fail to escape being monological, seeking to speak directly, they ensure a kind of total division / creation of the reading subject. it is not as it is in maurice blanchot's thomas the obscure, where thomas is reading and losing himself in the text, but instead there's a level of conversation, but you cannot necessarily respond. but idk, that's only some of these works, i don't think i can really level that at he fucked the girl out of me, the game elements make you participate in a way where you are writing/unwriting the text, so the way it's read is different. i guess more there in the critical thinking, i am thinking of something like dys4ia. i also do value vulnerability, a ton, i don't want it to seem like i don't or something, just that vulnerability is more complex/difficult than the most confessional work we see presents it. it, in certain cases, does truly require one to go beyond normal sociality and engage in a ways that seem wrong, speak incorrectly, cruelly, hysterically, whatever, speaking along the outer limits of acceptability. i think he fucked the girl out of me gets there, but i do also think its digressions to the player, moments where she says 'i can't explain this, this is a game, here's the short version,' and so on, that stuff gets in the way almost. this makes me sound really awful i guess, i'm being too hard almost? i dunno. the more i talk about it the more i admire it, because i think basically all games of this type kind of struggle with this, kitty horrorshow doesn't but she was making horror and her games were very light on this kind of particular writing, lilithofthezone was so abstract as well, the games weren't unemotional but the laughter of the carnivalesque was permitted, or that particular mode of feeling/sensing, under the weight of all that severity and so on, the boundary between tears of laughter and pain blurred totally. i think he fucked the girl out of me definitely marks a step towards getting closer to this in these kinds of games.

i also think the person that made it, taylor mccue, seems admirable, to me at least.

the other game i played today, was minecraft. i have to play with cube shaped objects to soothe my mind sometimes i guess. it is nice to play the game. my computer is so bad that my render distance is like, 3 chunks large. it's fucked but i am happy playing it. it really does soothe me. that says things about the kind of brain i have that i need this kind of thing sometimes like i need #### ### (censored) other times, and then other times i just need to write or whatever.

still feeling nostalgia for that early queer game wave, idek if it really was a wave or not, or if i was just too immersed or something. it's funny how much i liked all that and insisted on my being "normal" at the time. when i was like 8 years old, i swear, 8 or 12?? before 12, definitely. my cousin said to me:

you're going to be one of those people that gets their penis cut off and grows boobs.

and i said:

i don't know.

i'm definitely no the type to want bottom surgery. it's funny he didn't see that in me at all when i was living with him/my aunt, though. maybe he did and just didn't say anything.

tomorrow i definitely have to at least get that drum idea down, i hope i can continue to remember it, i'm sure it's mutant by now but the idea is still there, i can hear it, really. i love when i can hear ideas. it's just very hard to translate a lot of the time.

anyways i am like falling asleep on the ground so i just need to go to bed,

so

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[tanvkiisvshii]

[pretty-toastie]

But in all seriousness (because i'm incapable of just shitposting without backing it up with reason, it's a problem. i should be asleep), death of the author is all well and good for the consumption of media, but people need to understand that they are not entitled to critique media from a perspective that ignores artistic intent. If you have any desire to understand or talk about any piece of media, the creator's intent is an essential piece of that understanding.

You CANNOT, for example, understand indie games like Anna Anthropy's dys4ia or Zoë Quinn's Depression Quest without knowing that they are both intended to be chronicles of personal experience. People have complained about both on the grounds that they are inadequate or inaccurate representations of the experiences of, respectively, gender dysphoria and depression. [1]

This is objectively a misreading of the works. Depression Quest is about QUINN's experience. It is not prescriptive. Likewise, dys4ia is about ANTRHOPY's experience with navigating dysphoria and the medical and societal systems which make life for trans people difficult. It is, again, not prescriptive.

Critique of these works on the grounds that they don't represent everyone's experiences is not a valid criticism. It's like complaining that a fantasy novel isn't realistic: it isn't trying to be. [2]

So, go, consume your media, and care not about the author's intent. If it brings you more joy to project your own interpretations onto a work, do it! [3] But if you want to examine media in a critical manner, if you want anything more than a surface level understanding, if you want to critique a work in any way, you cannot ignore the author's intent.

Footnotes:

[1] Depression Quest has also been "critiqued" on many other grounds, nearly all of them bad faith and bigoted. I don't want to talk about G*merG*te. I could not write any degree of an informative post about it. I would lose my shit. It makes me so fucking mad. Also it might get me doxxed. If you're curious, watch this video. Content warnings are included, and please, loves, pay attention to them if you don't know what G*merG*te was/is. It's bad.

Also, in case you're wondering, I'm censoring the word because I don't really wanna attract any of that crowd? For them to be aware of my existence could be genuinely dangerous, and it might be a little paranoid, but I just don't want to risk it :/

[2] Critique and analysis of works absolutely does not have to be limited to artistic intent. Saying "I interpreted x media like this" is, in my opinion, one of the coolest parts of media analysis. Additionally, you can ABSOLUTELY discuss whether or not intent is relevant in the face of public perception; if the entire audience of a work reads it one way, there are grounds for that being more relevant for understanding its impact than the author's intent. All I'm saying here is that you cannot completely disregard authorial intent just because you want to.

[3] Keep in mind, though, that some media just will be better if you know the author's intent. It's just the way that things are. You can still project your own interpretations onto it afterward, but you will be missing out if you refuse to consider authorial intent. You have to decide if that's worth it to you.

death of the author? DEATH OF THE AUTHOR??? babe just TRY to kill me

[motherlodeirl]

Dys4ia es un videojuego autobiográfico creado por la desarrolladora trans Anna Anthropy. Consiste en una crónica o diario en forma de minijuegos (al estilo de WarioWare), divididos en cuatro niveles, sobre la experiencia personal de la autora con la disforia de género y la terapia de sustitución hormonal. Este presenta la iconografía, estética y mecánicas de los juegos arcade de los 70, 80 y 90, que hacen que el jugador las conecte, como un equivalente lúdico del lenguaje cinematográfico, a un conjunto de paradigmas que han ido adquiriendo un significado compartido por la mayoría de los públicos, para luego subvertirlas con el fin de jugar con sus expectativas y generar (y representar) frustración. Aquí lo importante no es ganar, sino progresar. Por otra parte, en Dys4ia se hace uso de la repetición de algunas mecánicas como herramienta narrativa. Algunos de los minijuegos se repiten a lo largo de los cuatro niveles con ligeras variantes para reflejar los cambios que la autora fue experimentando en su proceso de transición.

[superqueerallstars]

Dys4ia by Anna Anthropy. Find it here: http://auntiepixelante.com/?p=1515

[sqviid]

[dizzy-winter]

lather, shave, repeat,

polka-dot rose petals bloodstains

try not to look too closely

at yourself in the mirror

thumbnail matchbox jawline

three days, six hours

it makes no difference

don’t look too closely

at the razor

don’t think about what it can do

lather, shave, repeat

[messier82]

once more i find myself unable to sleep at 1 am and contemplating just going all out during third lockdown and getting an industrial piercing again

[corecataclysm]

.

[fade-out-lights]

DIGITAL: A LOVE STORY; BULLY; GRAND THEFT AUTO IV; PORTAL; DYS4IA by Christine Love; Rockstar Games; Valve Corporation; Anna Anthropy 

[blubberquark]

Losing is Fun

When VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy came out in 2010, they were radical departures from established concepts of game difficulty. Games used to have autosave or save slots, but also lives and health, so that when you overwrote your save in a low-health state you could paint yourself into a corner. Other games had regenerating health, or let you restart over and over from the last checkpoint.

Instead, VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy both had a binary state of life or death. Every hazard was lethal. In VVVVVV, the landscape was riddled with autosave checkpoints. Super Meat Boy was difficult, but levels were short. Restarting was instantaneous. There was no "Game Over" screen, no death animation that could not be skipped, just getting back into the action instantly with a single button press. Most importantly, unlike Super Mario World, neither game has a penalty for dying 50 times in a row.

Super Meat Boy could have been different, with lives and mushrooms and coins, and when you are low on of lives, you might be tempted to go back to the equivalent of "Donut Plains" to farm some 1UP mushrooms. But Super Meat Boy was innovating on Super Mario World by being easier in one way and much, much more difficult in another. There is a very different concept of difficulty, failure, and losing.

Instead of being “easier”, these games took the sting out of failure states, and got the player back into the game quickly.

When I am making a game, I try to focus the difficulty into the game's core gameplay, and in the core loop. If it's a puzzle game, I want the puzzles to be difficult and engaging, not the stuff around it, and I don't want the player to be able to grind his way through the meat of the game by spending effort on all the other parts. That means I'd rather make a boss fight just a little more forgiving by default than give the player the option to grind. I’d rather make platforming easier in order to put emphasis on puzzles.

In my experience, about nine times out of ten, when you identify a difficult section in the game during playtesting, it needs to be dealt with for players of all skill levels. The solution is rarely to just give the player “more health” to tank the hits. It’s usually better to more clearly telegraph what is required to overcome the challenge, to put the required tutorialisation earlier in the game, or to re-design the level/boss/timings/attacks for all skill levels. During playtests, I have often observed players struggle and fail at a certain point because they tried the wrong strategy over and over convinced that they could win by executing their flawed strategy perfectly rather than thinking of an alternative.

Some games can't have difficulty settings. I can think of some persuasive games, for example Depression Quest, Dys4ia, and You Have To Burn The Rope, whose central idea would be undermined by difficulty settings. I can also think of un-gamey interactive experiences such as Proteus, The Stanley Parable, Mountain, or Windosill, where difficulty is just not applicable.

In cases in which difficulty is applicable, there is rarely only one way to implement it. The Curse of Monkey Island had a "regular" mode and a "harder mode" with more puzzles, but no "easy mode". The different difficulty settings in Mobility change the game's goals and platforming mechanics. The difficulty settings in VVVVVV slow down the game by up to 40%. You could give characters more health, more lives, drop more loot, change the sizes of hitboxes, remove obstacles from levels, let the player jump farther, or make the enemy AI stupid.

More drastic interventions like increased jump distance can turn easy mode in a completely different game, such that getting better at easy mode won't help with normal mode. With increased jump distance in a platformer, solutions that work in hard mode might not even work in easy mode either.

Other games have a different focus. Nuclear Throne is a coffebreak action roguelike-like about dying and retrying. If there was an "easy mode" and a save/reload function, players might be tempted to crank the difficulty so low they can beat the game in one run. This is clearly not what the designers intended. Vlambeer's next game Luftrausers was even more explicitly focused on dying and retrying.

Reasoning like “so that players of all skill levels can complete the game like the designer intended“ implies that the designer intended the player to beat the game in the first place. Saying “all games should have difficulty settings“ is an expression of a certain expectation of what games “should“ be, and definitely incompatible with moral objections to the term “walking simulator“.

Ending a run of Papers, Please in starvation and poverty is just as “valid“ as doing your duty for Arstozka, just as valid as getting caught helping dissidents, just as valid as buying fake documents and fleeing. Still, it’s conceivable that such a game could have difficulty settings - but it doesn’t need to.

Balance your game so that the difficulty lies in the core gameplay, not in minigames, movement, or ancillary mechanics. Limit the downsides of failing minigames.

Re-work situations that are too difficult, rather than giving the player “more health“. Make it easier to dodge or seek cover rather than tank hits. Make sure the player knows which parts are supposed to be difficult, and what is impossible. Tell the player the information necessary to beat the next challenge - unless the challenge is a riddle. These changes often solve the same problem that difficulty levels would solve. Corollary: Remove grinding and resource hoarding when possible.

If applicable, rethink your failure states, implied failure states, save system, penalties for losing, ease of restarting, distance from save points, and permanent progression.

When your players lose too often, make losing fun!

[baeddel]

art about transgressive subjects having three kinds. the first is the Walk on the Wild Side with Lou Reed, or, worse, Mark Knopfler’s Les Boys, both of which could be given the subtitle Transsexuals I Have Met. there can be many reasons to walk on the wild side. it can elicit our sympathy as in empathy games (Depression Quest, Dys4ia), it can shock and titilate us as in the confessional (William Burroughs Junky, first titled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict), and in those days when bohemianism was fashionable it was thought that it could provide literary inspiration (Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer interests us to the extent that it fails to walk on the wild side, a writer who doesn’t manage to find the romance in being homeless in Paris that symbolist literature promised him, who cannot even enjoy Debussy for his empty stomach, and who visits sex workers with a little reluctance in order to write some miserable verses about it). when walking on the wild side the reader is a tourist enjoying a private immersion in an alien social world.

the second is what we tend to call ‘representation,’ but what do we mean when we say it? it is not so much the doubling of an object in a new media which always occurs; we don’t worry about the representation of lamps, green fields and marigolds. it’s a representation of a subject which takes on the force of a categorical representation of a categorical subject. Angela from Sleepaway Camp, “nude and blood-covered, growling like an animal,” invites us to recognize the deranged psychology which animates all trans women. these days if you don’t know how to make the substitution of category for character you will be reading very differently from your peers. but we are always at risk of becoming one of Langstone Hughes’ black critics who “wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot—and only that foot” and called him a sewer-dwelling “disgrace to the race” (Hughes, the Big Sea: an Autobiography), who could see nothing in any text but a categorical substitution. in order to avoid categorical blunders writers and directors hire sensitivity consultants who can provide a risk-benefit analysis of every line of text. when viewing representations the reader is a statistical public, a suggestible subject the author must handle carefully.

[Major Nier spoilers follow!]

what is this third depiction, which doesn’t make its reader a tourist, and doesn’t reduce its characters to categories? Yoko Taro does not always succeed, but he usually succeeds. in several of his games we first acquire the viewpoint of a set of characters who we later learn are complete outcasts. instead of making us tourists to transgression we experience the world primarily by transgressing its boundaries. the more we transgress the social world we’re given the more we come to recognize its illusory nature. we realize that it’s a self-deluding society that dreams up its own nightmares, makes its own outcasts. this is demonstrated most dramatically in Nier when he is asked to leave Kaine and Emil outside of town which, on the second playthrough, we learn echoes their already existing social exclusions. Yet the more we learn this, the more we find ourselves with a perspective different from our characters. We begin to see that, though outcasts, they have more in common with their tormentors than real differences. They share the same illusions and don’t know how to escape the same traps. It’s ultimately these outcast characters which the game criticizes. What they take for granted they remain complicit in. It tells us: delinquents, your delinquincy isn’t enough. Go further!

Yet despite the social critique we cannot easily substitute his characters for categories. Not only is Kaine too bold and unique to stand in for any of us, but who she would stand in for is ambiguous. On the first playthrough she is merely a woman who lives by her own means and wears lingerie, a trope which we recognize but which is so out of place in the world of Nier that it amuses. It’s as though she attempts to stand in for a bunch of stock characters and anime tropes that are completely inadequate to her. It is only on the second playthrough, in the added dialogue and cutscenes, that we learn that she is an outcast because of her ‘monstrous’ nature. But there is still an ambiguity. It makes her monstrous in two ways: a physical monstrosity, her possession by Tyrann, and her social monstrosity, her unacceptable genitals, so far referenced only indirectly in a line which reads: “we know what you really are.” Most lines about this are double entendres which are as true of one monstrosity as the other. It isn’t until you encounter the secondary material, the short stories and the audio CD, that you finally have enough material to categorize her unambiguously. But we still can’t quite do it; is she transgender or intersex? Neither fit perfectly, both leave a little space for the other. In the final moment Kaine represents no one—and that’s why trans women like her. It’s not her lack of categories but our failure to categorize her, a failure in which the attempt is preserved, which teaches us how to be ourselves.

Yoko Taro never allows the reader to be a mere tourist in his games. The stakes are too serious, the characters too articulate, the context so enormous. And the player is never some general player, a suggestible public which the director should manage. While his games are persuasive, they contain critiques, the critiques depend upon coordinates that both author and reader share. The reader must be familiar with the tropes and conventions that it deploys in order to grasp the arguments. The reader of Yoko Taro is always an intimately familiar one who the game invites to conversation, gently in the first round, aggressively in the second. While the first two types frame transgression as a play of you and them, Yoko Taro’s games are a we which, like the word we, is both univocal and equivocal.